My understanding is that they discovered they’d bitten off a bit more than they could chew (or at least fit into the intended episode count) when they were too far into production to pull back, and that’s why the guy from the other continent appears in one episode of the main series, then is never spoken of again in the main run but has an entire episode-length OAV to cover his backstory. (I’m still not sure whether they should be called “OAVs” when the A stands for “Anime”. ODVs?)
Anyway, we’ll see if they manage to fold things back together when the second season airs next year.
headward_scissorfeet@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
OAV is one of those old terms that denotes a video that skipped movie theaters and television and went straight to video (like VHS tapes and then disc based media later) back before the days of streaming, so you could think of scheduled streams as being like television- sometimes this format is called linear and the recordings of these streams are called video on demand or VODs.
So, most anime platforms have a scheduled release of videos that are more or less synchronized with TV releases, so it’s easier to think of those VODs as TV and the videos that are not broadcast are OAVs because typically they are packaged as extra material in DVDs.